Submission + - Facebook's "independent" fact checks face quiet political, financial pressures (fastcompany.com) 1
tedlistens writes: Facing questions about a mysterious series of changes to some fact-check labels, Facebook recently wrote to a group of senators with an assurance: its fact checkers can and do label "opinion" content if it crosses the line into falsehood.
What Facebook didn't tell the senators: the company draws that line, and can pressure changes to fact checks & misinformation penalties. And it does. Facebook acknowledged to me that it may ask fact checkers to change their ratings, and that it exercises control over pages' internal misinformation strikes.
In one case—a video containing misinformation about climate change published by PragerU—Facebook downgraded a fact-check label from "false" to "partly false," and removed the page's misinformation strikes.
Was the change warranted? "Let me put it this way," says Scott Johnson, an editor at Climate Feedback, one of Facebook's third-party fact checking organizations. "Our reviewers gave it a -2 rating on our +2 to -2 scale and our summary describes it as 'incorrect and misleading to viewers,' so we had selected the 'false' label accordingly."
In some cases the video now carries no apparent label at all. After an update that Facebook announced last week, the company is using what it calls a "lighter-weight warning label" for "partly false" content in the U.S.: an unobtrusive box below the video under "related articles" that says "fact check," with a link. Meanwhile, older versions of the video appeared to evade labels completely: A handful of other PragerU posts containing the video appear without any labeling, a review by Fast Company found. Versions of the labeled and unlabeled video have now racked up millions of views since April 2016, when it was first published.
What Facebook didn't tell the senators: the company draws that line, and can pressure changes to fact checks & misinformation penalties. And it does. Facebook acknowledged to me that it may ask fact checkers to change their ratings, and that it exercises control over pages' internal misinformation strikes.
In one case—a video containing misinformation about climate change published by PragerU—Facebook downgraded a fact-check label from "false" to "partly false," and removed the page's misinformation strikes.
Was the change warranted? "Let me put it this way," says Scott Johnson, an editor at Climate Feedback, one of Facebook's third-party fact checking organizations. "Our reviewers gave it a -2 rating on our +2 to -2 scale and our summary describes it as 'incorrect and misleading to viewers,' so we had selected the 'false' label accordingly."
In some cases the video now carries no apparent label at all. After an update that Facebook announced last week, the company is using what it calls a "lighter-weight warning label" for "partly false" content in the U.S.: an unobtrusive box below the video under "related articles" that says "fact check," with a link. Meanwhile, older versions of the video appeared to evade labels completely: A handful of other PragerU posts containing the video appear without any labeling, a review by Fast Company found. Versions of the labeled and unlabeled video have now racked up millions of views since April 2016, when it was first published.
Facts are binary (Score:2)
They're either true, or they aren't.
We'll leave the discussion of the uncertainty principle for elsewhere.
Misleading, being disingenuous; those and facts are NOT mutually exclusive, but to label something as factually wrong when it is factually true, but it might be misleading, is, in itself, factually wrong.
Mark it what is is. Not what's convenient. Stop playing fucking games and muddying the waters. Can it be proven or disproved? Factual statement. All else? Opinion, imperative, interrogative, etc., but n